Pedro Carbo Noboa was born in Guayaquil on March 19, 1813, the son of Colonel José Carbo Unzueta and Josefa Noboa. He grew up in the port city, spent a period in Mexico, and returned home to build a career in public service. In 1835 he became Official Mayor of the Ministry of Interior and Exterior Relations. He served as Secretary of Ecuadorian Legation, negotiated business agreements with New Granada and Peru, and in 1845 became General Minister of the Provisional Government after the Marcista Revolution - the March 1845 uprising that overthrew Juan José Flores and ended one of Ecuador's nineteenth-century political convulsions. He represented Guayas, Pichincha, and Chimborazo in various national assemblies and helped shape the country's early constitutional order. Proposed for the presidency in 1864, he declined and turned his energies instead to attacking García Moreno's authoritarian rule. That opposition sent him into exile, first to Paris and then to Peru, where he died in 1894.

The land had other names before it had his. The area was once called Rio Nuevo - "new river" - and served as an important town in the parish of San Juan de Soledad, now known as Isidro Ayora, east of modern Pedro Carbo. On August 1, 1893, the name changed to Caamaño, and the settlement was designated a rural parroquia of Daule Canton. Two years later, during Ecuador's 1895 Liberal Revolution, the name changed again - this time to honor Pedro Carbo Noboa, whose opposition to García Moreno had made him a hero to liberal reformers. The Territorial Division Law of 1897 made the new name official. The town spent most of the twentieth century as a parish before finally achieving cantonal status in 1984, eighty-nine years after taking Carbo's name.

Pedro Carbo Canton is sometimes described as "land-locked coastal" - a phrase that captures its paradoxical geography. It sits in Guayas Province, which is coastal, but the canton itself has no ocean frontage. Instead it covers 941.2 square kilometers of inland terrain at the 63-kilometer marker on the Guayaquil-to-Manabí highway. The climate is tropical and hot. Annual average temperatures hover around 27°C. About 79 centimeters of rain fall each year, most of it concentrated in the invierno - the hot rainy season - from mid-December to mid-June. The drier verano covers the other six months. Parts of the canton remain as dry tropical forest, which in Ecuador is one of the most endangered ecosystems. A seasonal river named Pedro Carbo cuts through the territory, carrying water during the rainy season and drying to bed during the drought months.

Agriculture anchors the canton's economy. Most families have at least one member working the land, growing rice, corn, sunflowers for cooking oil, peanuts, beans, mangoes, and bananas. The richest biodiversity of crops appears near water sources, where irrigation permits greater variety. Cattle and goats are the primary livestock. The canton is also known for its craft traditions - expert woodworkers, and weavers producing the toquilla-straw hats the world calls Panama hats. Two main holidays structure the local calendar. On June 29, the canton celebrates its twin patron saints, Saint Peter and Saint Paul, in honor of the name Pedro. On July 19, Pedro Carbo commemorates its 1984 cantonization with parades down the main street, public dances, and social ceremonies. The 2010 census recorded the canton's ethnic makeup as 57 percent Mestizo, 33 percent Montubio - the rural coastal identity specific to western Ecuador - with smaller Afro-Ecuadorian, white, and indigenous communities.